Updated August 7, 2025 at 3:52 PM EDT
With preparations for the 2030 census already underway, President Trump said Thursday he has instructed his administration to start work on a "new" census.
According to a social media post by Trump, that census would exclude millions of people living in the country without legal status — an unprecedented change to how the country has conducted population tallies since the first U.S. census in 1790.
The 14th Amendment requires the "whole number of persons in each state" to be included in a key set of census numbers used to determine how presidents and members of Congress are elected.
The Trump administration has released no details about the plan. As a result, much is unclear, such as whether Trump — who, according to the Constitution, does not have final authority over the census — is referring to the regularly scheduled national head count in 2030 or an earlier tally.
Trump said he's instructed the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, to "immediately begin work" on a census using "the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024." It's unclear why the election results would matter to the census.
The press offices for the White House, Commerce Department and Census Bureau did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.
The Constitution did not grant a president final authority over the census
Article 1 of the Constitution empowers Congress — not the president — to carry out the "actual enumeration" of the country's population in "such manner as they shall by law direct." In Title 13 of the U.S. Code, Congress directed the secretary of commerce to follow a once-a-decade census schedule.
Under that same law, the commerce secretary can conduct a mid-decade census, in 2025, but the results can't be used for redistributing each state's share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College. And the question topics for such a 2025 census would have needed to be reported to Congress years ago.
Still, while the Constitution requires a census every 10 years for the once-a-decade redistribution of congressional seats, it's not clear whether a head count could be conducted another year, with results used for reapportioning each state's share of House seats and Electoral College votes.
Trump's demand for a new census appears to align with a House bill that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, introduced last month. That bill calls for not only excluding noncitizens from the apportionment numbers, but also a new census and round of congressional redistricting before the 2026 midterm election.
Asked about the bill, Trump said in July, "It's going to get in. It's going to pass, and we're going to be very happy."
This year, other Republicans in Congress have reintroduced bills that call for excluding either people without legal status or all people without U.S. citizenship, including green card holders, from the regularly scheduled 2030 apportionment counts.
Trump's census comments on Thursday also come after his vocal push for Republicans in various states to redistrict in an attempt to pick up more seats in the U.S. House. The GOP's gambit to redraw the congressional map in Texas has set off a national political battle, with Democrats in other states preparing potential responses, including their own partisan gerrymandering.
"It is no coincidence that President Trump wants to manipulate the census data at the same time he is pressuring Republican states to gerrymander even more," says John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, in a statement. "This is a comprehensive campaign to flout the U.S. Constitution in order to predetermine election outcomes so he can consolidate his power and avoid accountability to the American people."
Hours after Trump's post, the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that led lawsuits over Trump's failed efforts to change who was counted in the 2020 census, signaled another legal battle may be on the horizon. In a statement, Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said any attempt by the Trump administration to exclude U.S. residents without legal status from a census "would defy the Constitution, federal law, and settled precedent."
"We won't hesitate to go back to court to protect representation for all communities," Lakin added.
If Trump is referring to the 2030 census, legal experts say that Trump's successor or Congress may — in 2029 — have an opportunity to get rid of any added question about a person's immigration status before it's printed on paper forms for the 2030 census.
The Census Bureau is in the middle of a years-long process to gear up for that census. Last month, it released the first version of its operational plan for that count, and it has been scheduled to start recruiting this fall for temporary workers to carry out the "2026 Census Test," a major field test for its 2030 plans that's set to take place in six areas in the South and West.
Coming days after Trump's firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner after the release of a weaker-than-expected jobs report, Trump's call for a census "using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024" resurfaces concerns about the integrity of the data the federal government produces, says Meeta Anand, senior director of census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
"To me, that represents an attempt to undermine and sow doubt on existing data and to raise the specter of manipulating data going forward," Anand says. "It's all part and parcel of the same playbook of telling people not to believe what is existing already and what has been collected and tabulated and reported in accordance with scientific standards and principles, and instead to believe what is being put in front of them without evidence for the purposes of political gain."
Trump's 2020 census bid to exclude people without legal status was stopped
Trump's latest push renews similar efforts from his first administration. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately stopped a question about a person's U.S. citizenship status from being added to 2020 census forms but declined to rule on whether people without legal status can be, for the first time in U.S. history, excluded by the president from apportionment counts.
Former President Joe Biden affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in the states in those tallies with a 2021 executive order, which Trump revoked on the first day of his second term.
Using the census to ask about a person's immigration status has yet to be tested by the Census Bureau.
But research by the bureau shows that using the once-a-decade tally by the federal government to ask the question "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" is likely to produce faulty self-reported data and discourage many households with Latino or Asian American residents from getting counted. Population totals are also used for dividing up trillions in federal funding for public services in communities across the country.
The bureau's researchers have also warned that attempting to produce neighborhood-block level citizenship data with a new census question would be "very costly," harm the quality of other demographic statistics the census produces and yield "substantially less accurate" data than information available from existing government records about people's citizenship status.
The Supreme Court found the first Trump administration's stated justification for a census citizenship question — to better enforce the voting rights of racial minority groups — appeared "contrived."
As a result, Trump issued a 2019 executive order that spelled out other reasons for producing citizenship data, which would be more detailed than the estimates the bureau already releases. They included informing immigration policy and eligibility rules for public benefits, and coming up with a count of people in the U.S. without legal status. Another reason the order outlined was allowing state and local governments to draw voting districts that do not account for children and non-U.S. citizens. That radical departure from current standard redistricting practices would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites," a 2015 report by a Republican redistricting strategist concluded. Its legality is an open question before the Supreme Court.
A 2020 presidential memorandum ultimately confirmed another goal for Trump's first push for a citizenship question — data that would allow for the unprecedented exclusion of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status from the congressional apportionment counts.
While officials in the first Trump administration often emphasized that some past national head counts have asked about people's U.S. citizenship status in some way, census records going back to 1820 show that Trump's proposal bucks centuries of precedent. The federal government has never before used the census to directly ask for the citizenship status of every person living in every household in the United States.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2025 NPR
